Professor Kevin Middlebrook

Professor of Latin American Politics

Biography

Kevin J. Middlebrook is Professor of Latin American Politics at the
Institute of the Americas, University College London. He was previously
affiliated with the Institute of Latin American Studies (2002-04) and the
Institute for the Study of the Americas (2004-12), both at the University of
London. Between 1995 and 2001 he was Director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican
Studies at the University of California, San Diego, where he also held an
appointment as Adjunct Professor of Political Science.

Educated at Harvard University, he has held postdoctoral fellowships at the
Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies (1983-84, 1991) and the Hoover Institution on
War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University (1993-94), as well as
research grants from the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research
Council, the Howard Heinz Endowment, the Fulbright Commission, and the Nuffield
Foundation.

His professional activities include service as an editorial board member of
the Latin American Research Review (1997-2000) and the Journal of Latin
American Studies (2006-12), multiple interviews on Latin American politics and
US foreign policy with newspapers and electronic news media throughout the
world, and consultancies with government agencies in the United Kingdom and the
United States. Within the international Latin American Studies Association, he
has served as a member (1992-94) and co-chair (1994-97) of the Task Force on
Human Rights and Academic Freedom, a member of the steering committee for the
working group on labour studies (1994-95), chair of the “Democracy and Human
Rights” section of the 1994-95 Congress programme committee, co-founder and
co-chair of the organized section on Mexico (2009-12), co-chair of the
Development Committee (2012-14), and the Association’s first elected Treasurer
(2006-10).

He has served as a Ph.D. examiner at Indiana
University-Bloomington in the United States, La Trobe University in Australia,
and, in the United Kingdom, King’s College London, the London School of
Economics and Political Science, the University of Birmingham, the University
of Essex, the University of Oxford, the University of Sheffield, the University
of Sussex, and the University of Warwick.

Current research

Professor Middlebrook’s
current research examines alternative strategies for the international defence
of workers’ rights. . It focuses empirically on the special labour institutions
created in association with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
systematically evaluating their performance over their first fifteen years of
operation and exploring the domestic and international factors that have shaped
their capacity to address labour rights violations in Canada, Mexico and the
United States. The project also compares the NAFTA experience with labour-rights regimes in the Central American Free Trade
Agreement (CAFTA), the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) and the European
Union, and it assesses the effectiveness of trade agreement-linked
institutional arrangements compared to such alternative rights-protection
strategies as corporate social responsibility campaigns and internationally
sanctioned labour norms like those promoted by the International Labour
Organization. The research highlights the tensions between national sovereignty
and the cross-national or supranational protection of labour rights, and it considers
the conditions under which labour organizations and their political allies can
strengthen safeguards of worker rights.

Current teaching and supervision

Professor Middlebrook supervises research (MPhil/PhD) students examining
the comparative and international politics of Latin America. Past and current
students have analysed such topics as the politics of media regulation in the
Southern Cone, ethnicity and indigenous political participation in Peru and
other Andean countries, political clientelism and democracy in Belize,
constitutional reform and democratization in Colombia, the politics of electoral
reform in Latin America, labour rights and corporate social responsibility in
the Central American garment industry, the politics of state-led economic
development in Mexico and South Korea, and Ecuadorean foreign policy and the ‘law
of the sea’.

The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico
(Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), winner of the 1996 Hubert Herring Book Prize from the
Pacific Coast Council of Latin American Studies

Mexico Since 1980: A Second Revolution in Economics, Politics, and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Edited or co-edited

The United States and Latin America in the 1980s: Contending Perspectives
on a Decade of Crisis (University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1986)

Unions, Workers, and the State in Mexico (Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1991)

In addition, Prof Middlebrook has published articles in major English- and
Spanish-language journals, including Bulletin
of Latin American Research, Comparative Politics, Estudios Sociológicos, Foro
Internacional, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of Latin American
Studies, Labor Studies Journal, Latin American Research Review, Revista
Mexicana de Sociología, and World
Politics, as well as chapters in numerous edited books.

The British Network on Latin American Politics promotes debates and
exchanges on contemporary Latin American politics, public policy and
international affairs. It also facilitates collaboration among university-based
researchers at a number of universities, including King’s College London, London
School of Economics and Political Science, University College London, University
of Bradford, University of Oxford, University of Sheffield and others.